Economic Fiction, 19452000

michael w. clune, American Literature and the Free Market, 19452000 (Cambridge: Cam-bridge UP, 2010), pp. 211, cloth, $93.00.Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michael W. Clune claims that Joshua Clover andJasper Bernes misrepresent him in their response to his review of Daniel Stedman JonessMasters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. Clune writes thatwhile he appreciates Joness central argument (that neoliberalism resulted from the largelyad hoc pragmatism of politicians on the left as well as on the right), Jones fails to interpretthe broader cultural context of the rise of neoliberalism. In particular, Clune writes,he gives short shrift to the troubling ascendance of free market thinking in the west after WorldWar II. I did not have time in my review to spell out my own sense of the reasons for thattransformation. I refer interested readers to my American Literature and the Free Market(Cambridge University Press, 2010). In the conclusion to that book, I venture a large-scaleanalysis of the problem, drawing on Marxs insights in his Critique of the Gotha Program. Inmy view, Marx continues to be an indispensable resource for leftist thought about the economy.(Clover, Bernes, and Clune)These are curious remarks, for readers picking up Clunes study will nd nothing like anaccount of the broader cultural context that gives rise to neoliberalism and nothing like alarge-scale analysis of the troubling ascendance of free market thinking; nor will theynd any indication that Clune nds that ascendance troubling, let alone an account of howKarl Marx might function as an indispensable resource for leftist thought about the econ-omy. What Clunes study does is read poems, novels, and lms alongside counterintuitiveinterpretations of Marx, F. A. Hayek, Karl Polanyi, and Hannah Arendt to suggest that astrain of postwar literature represents less a background for the rise of free-market thinking(Clune is dismissive of those who read literature and lm as cultural context) than some-thing like the distillation and perfection of free-market thinking. Clune does not argue thathis subjects are neoliberal. That word does not appear in his book. He is not interested inplacing his objects of studyon any predictable political continuum. Rather, he is interestedinshowing us how some postwar cultureincluding writing by Kathy Acker, William Bur-roughs, William Gaddis, William Gibson, Frank OHara, and Sylvia Plath, as well as lmsand music by Paul Thomas Anderson, Jay Z, Dr. Dre, andthe Notorious B.I.G.understandsthe promise of free markets (truly free markets) in what Clune thinks are strikingly inno-vative ways.As Clune sees it, neither the Left nor the Right can understand why the marketor, ashe will alternately call it, the economicexerts such a powerful allure. Terms like themarket and the economic remain abstract andamorphous in Clunes hands. But this doesnot prevent him from opening his study with a series of categorical assertions. Behind theeconomic, all parties agree, lies something else (2). The Left is against the market because itconceals and mysties social relations. The Right is for the market but sees it as little morethan a mechanism for reecting the values and desires of sovereign individuals. Only prop-erly aesthetic renditions of the marketeconomic ctions, Clune calls themreveal it tobe not just an object in its own right but a transformative space that makes available radicallynewkinds of experience. Borrowing fromHeidegger, he argues that economic ctions opena space outside the social world (7) and thus allow us to escape into something potentiallytransforming. In such ctions, he writes, interest and desire play across an environmentalready organized by price. Instead of imposing a limit on ones ability to procure what onealready knows one wants, the limit imposed by price acts to shape ones perception of whatone wants. . . . In the space opened by these works, the market is a self-organizing systemthat links every object of an individuals experience to every object of everyones experience.One sees things through price. In short, in such works, price structures subjectivity (4).A subjectivity structured by price is a subjectivity freed from the tyranny of the socialand its regime of intersubjectivity. The social is dependent upon reciprocal acts of recogni-tion; in it, we become subjects by virtue of being seen and acknowledged by others. Theeconomic ction affords us access to an incipiently collective mode of being dened, how-ever paradoxically, by its indifference to or removal from the recognition of others. Priceprovides an interface between an embodied awareness and a global collective (22). In theeconomic ction, Clune writes, the collective rises in the moment-by-moment organiza-tion of rst person experience by market forces (25). For Clune, price tells us all we needtoknow about market forces and the assemblages produced therein: when he speaks of thecollective brought forth by his objects of study, he refers to aggregated individuals who ndrelease from intersubjectivity by following the ebb and owof their desires as they confrontuctuations in price.Clune reads The Bell Jar as an early postwar example of the escape from intersubjectivity.For Plath, he writes, the dialectic of recognition is evil (32). It is therefore less a problemthan an opportunity when Esther Greenwood looks into a mirror and fails to recognizeherself there. She breaks the mirror and produces fromthe ruins of its shards the image of anew subject not dened by recognition. This new subject possesses a radical conscious-ness freed from any dependence on an object, a body, a face, or a position (29). On theother hand, this radical consciousness promises access to language andforms of communalvalue (30) that Clune does not specify. What we do not nd in this account of The Bell Jar,moreover, is any discussion of market or price. Clune understands this novel as an early andnot fully elaborated version of the economic ction that emerges most fully in his chapter onrap and hip-hop, and so it is perhaps understandable that this particular reading wouldconne itself to an isolated moment, the better to establish the evil his authors nd in thedialectic of recognition. It is worrisome, though, that much of this books argument proceedsin patchwork fashion, andthat the market functions for Clune, in one reading to the next,pretty much however he needs it to.Using a variety of techniques, the works in his study remove the economic fromwhatHannah Arendt calls the public world, the social space where visibility confers reality. Thistransforms the market in basic ways (147). So transformed is this market that it oftenappears like no market at all. So, for instance, Clune has fascinating things to say about therelation between perception andsymbol inthe experimental ction of Burroughs. It will turnout that price functions in the writings of Hayek in the same way that symbols do forBurroughs: it places the elements encounteredinthe immediate context of embodiment interms of the context of the entire market, considered as the aggregate of all exchanges acrossthe world (94). Aversion of this account motivates Clunes short reading of Gaddiss JR, inwhichthe market functions as a self-correcting mechanismthat inhabits and speaks through320 NOVEL SUMMER 2014the boy whose transactions the novel chronicles. In his analysis of Burroughs, however, thecontext of the entire market vanishes, as does anyengagement with price: here, Clune has agreat deal to say about color and phenomenology but nothing at all to say about the eco-nomic.Just as frequently, Clunes readings turn on curiously insubstantial thematic invocationsof markets. The index sends us to eight mentions of Gibson in the main text, for example,six of which anticipate Clunes account of Neuromancer. The market structures the act oftouching (4) in Gibson, we are told in the introduction. Later, by way of explaining why itmakes sense to include in his study an analysis of Plaththat makes no mention of the market,we are told that the economic ction consolidates itself over the second half of the twen-tieth century, as we move fromPlathto OHara to Acker, Gibson, and rap (41). Later, Clunelists Gibson as a chief innovator in the project of ctionalizing the market (78). But theshort reading of Gibson, when nally we get to it, focuses on Gibsons vision of cyberspace.Clune argues that critics have obscuredthe meaning this term has for Gibson. He is intentto show how the body frames information, as he does in a strong reading of Acker, andhowcyberspace, as data made esh (117), represents for Gibson something like the escapefrom the social that we found in Plath. The punchline, though, is this: Gibsons model forcyberspace is a ctionalized market. By wayof proof, Clune cites a passage fromthe start ofthat novel in which Gibson describes a street market, andthen Clune concludes that, in thisnovel, bodies moving through the shops and bars and arcades show the intricate dance ofdesire and commerce, a free circulation of embodied knowledge that provides the templatefor cyberspace (ibid.). And that is it. Nothing more about a novel, by all appearances cen-tral to Clunes larger thesis, that is from rst to last about the depredations inherent in whatGibsonelsewhere calls end-stage capitalism, inwhichprivate enterprise andthe prot motiveare taken to their logical conclusion.Clune does not read Gibson against Fredric Jameson, for example, who nds in Neuro-mancer an expression of transnational corporate realities and an exceptional literary real-ization (38) of the cultural logic of late capitalism. Clune makes no mention of those real-ities. Unwilling to understand the economic as an expression of social relations, he rejectsJamesons practice of symptomatic reading; he will not move through or beyond a novel orpoem, the better to arrive at something prior or antecedent to it. But it is hardto understandwhat justies turning such a blind eye to the social relations actually represented withinparticular works. If we can speak of the market as Gibson conjures it, then why can we notspeak of the capitalism that he conjures, of which that market is an expression?We rst meet Gibsons protagonist, Henry Case, hustling fresh capital with cold inten-sity in an outlaw zone that is a deranged experiment in social Darwinism: stop hus-tling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and youd break the fragilesurface tension of [a] black market in which death [is] the accepted punishment for lazi-ness, carelessness, [or] lack of grace (7). Gibsons outlaw zones exist in the shadows of morefamiliar forms: Power, in Cases world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multi-nationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewedas organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldnt kill a zaibatsu by assas-sinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume thevacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory (196). To be sure, cyberspaceprovides Case with a temporary respite fromthe outlaw zones andurban slums to which heis consigned, but it does not facilitate his transcendence of the social into the beautiful etherSZALAY ECONOMIC FICTION, 19452000 321of price. And it most certainly does not allow Case to transcend corporate power. Incyberspace, Case facilitates the merger of two Articial Intelligences, and Gibson casts thatmerger as the evolution of a family company into a corporation freer than it has yet been toconduct its business with no reference to human want or need. Indeed, that merged entitywill remain safelyoff-planet, a removedlocation far more like our own offshore prot havensthan the kind of free market nonspace into which Clune imagines Gibson transporting us.Cyberspace does not free Case from the economic; quite the contrary, it gives him aclarifying access to the forces and relationships that organize his life.This is not what Clune would have us see. As he has it, From Adorno to Deleuze toJameson to the New Economic Critics to Agamben, to refer to the economic is to refer tocapitalist society. To refer to money is to refer to a set of social relations. Against thesethinkers, Clune wants to argue, in the most implausibly strong fashion, that the very fabricof the social might come apart in the fragile textures of artworks (162). But it is by no meansobvious what it means for the social to come apart in these works. It is clear enough thatClune abjures describing social relations. But this does not meanthat novels like Neuromancerand JR, or lms like Paul Thomas Andersons There Will Be Blood, themselves refuse to do so.Any claim that they do would indeed be implausible.To be sure, the social relations in a given novel are not necessarily the same as the socialrelations out of which a given author writes. It is more than possible that, when representingsocial relations, works of art obscure or mystify something about them. We might imag-ine, for example, that the radical libertarianism that Clune discovers in the works of Ackerobscures somethingessential about the way in which free markets function beyondher texts.But Clune is uninterested in arguments like these. His signicant nding (159), his ratherimmodest critical intervention (160), is that the economic ction does not cover up or jus-tify actual economic inequality. These works transformeconomic relations in sucha way thatinequality ceases to be of conceivable interest to anyone (159). He rejects a possible ideo-logical relation between the works in his study and social forces: The economic doesntwork here in the way it works in society, and this discrepancy is not determined by a sociallogic. The economic ction simply isnt in the social world. Its somewhere else. This is animportant social fact, with important social consequences (163).The categorical discrepancy between the economic in art and the economic in society isnot a modest one, Clune announces before urging us to become less comfortable withmodest claims about what art can do (ibid.). But the reader might be forgiven for remaininghazy about the important social consequences of Clunes own demonstrably immodestassertions. In his introduction, he claims that the economic ction constitutes a signicantsocial phenomenon (7) in its ability to represent a material alternative to the social (8).Having carefully constrainedthe manner in which his works of art might be saidto be aboutthe economic at all, Clune tells us that the economic does not work inthese works as it doesin society, only to tell us that this nonrelation constitutes a profoundrelation: the economic inart promises to transform something about how we understand or experience the economicin society. How to understand that transformation? Perhaps by way of these rapturous sen-tences, which conclude his study: The woman reading Neuromancer onthe subway, the mandriving to work with B.I.G. on his stereo: little sections of the market wink in and out ofvisibility. With the rst experiences of such works, a fault line appears down the center ofevery actual exchange. An invisible economy detaches from the visible economy. What willbe the social effects? (164).322 NOVEL SUMMER 2014If in one sense it is impossible to know where this leads, in another sense it is very easy.Clune has produced an intricate system in which the economic as we might conceivablyunderstand it winks in andout of visibility, a veritable Rube Goldberg machine whose twistsandturns return us, nally, to a familiar place. We need, Clune insists, to free ourselves fromthe outdatedthinking of Marx. That thinkers baleful inuence stems fromhis reliance onthelabor theory of value. As Clune sees it, [f]rom the perspective of the labor theory of value,money and circulation add nothing but malevolent illusion to the value placed in things attheir birthby the productive process (158). But the labor theoryof value has beendiscreditedfor well over a century. The arguments advanced against it are strong, Clune writes, and Iknow of no place where they have been refuted. I believe the labor theory of value to beindefensible (ibid.). For Clune, much follows from this assumption: out the window goesTheodor Adorno, for example, whose notion of negative, autonomous art might otherwisehave appealed: Adornos theory is predicated on the labor theory of value, alas, andinvolves a distinction between the subjective character of the evaluation of things producedby market processes, and the objective value placed in things by labor at the scene of pro-duction (160).Surely it matters, even in the midst of this categorical certainty, that Clune is simply, atlywrong: value is for Marx a social relationship, not a substance placed in objects at their birth.Clune attributes claims made by Adam Smith and David Ricardo to Marx, whose threevolumes of Capital insist, again and again, that a given commoditys value derives not fromthe concrete labor responsible for its production but fromthe relationship betweenthat laborand the total labor of society, as that relationship is concretized in given acts of exchange.Value is not a tangible characteristic of objects but, as Marx has it, the social relation of theproducers to the sumtotal of labor as social relations, which exist apart from and outside theproducers (1:165). Readers wanting a more thorough refutation of Clunes misconceptionsabout the labor theory of value should readthe response by Joshua Clover and Jasper Bernesto Clunes LARB review, mentioned above. Here I will add only that Clunes misreadingreturns us to what is so curious about the rest of his study: social relations appear only tovanish before appearing again in an unrecognizable and distorted form. Clune argues thatthe economic ction rewrites the market by severing it fromthe social, in the service of somesocial end we cannot yet fully imagine. One wishes that these abstract and abstractinginvolutions took shape in a more concrete relation to actually existing social relations. WhileClune believes that postwar literature transforms inequality until it ceases to be of con-ceivable interest to anyone, many of his readers, and readers of that literature, will likelyremain interested in it all the same.michael szalay, University of California, IrvineDOI 10.1215/00295132-2647230SZALAY ECONOMIC FICTION, 19452000 323Works CitedClover, Joshua, Jasper Bernes, andMichael W. Clune. Response to What Was Neoliberalism?:A Debate between Joshua Clover/Jasper Bernes and Michael W. Clune. Los Angeles Reviewof Books 4 Mar. 2013 <lareviewofbooks.org/essay/response-to-what-was-neoliberalism-a-debate-between-joshua-clover-jasper-bernes-and-michael-w-clune >.Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1986.324 NOVEL SUMMER 2014